Shadowrun

The reasons I’ve had for buying games over the years have been questionable at best. The most forgivable, in my opinion, are hungover purchases of which Shadowrun was one. I can’t remember the exact details but I think I got it as part of a 2 for £20 at a Gamestation sale at some point.

This was also before my time of checking out what the games were actually like as well. Had I known that 44 of 50 achievements could only be obtained by playing in live lobbies with random dickheads, I wouldn’t have bothered with it at all. Of course, I only realised this after I got the 6 offline achievements for training way back in 2011.

It wasn’t high on my ‘to play’ list by any means but then I saw one of my friends started playing it so I thought ‘why not?’ and joined him in several boosting sessions. Over the course of three months, I managed to hammer out the rest of the game.

Obviously playing with people all working towards the same achievements is very different from playing for real. Bearing in mind the game was released in 2007, I didn’t think people would actually still be playing it. I was wrong about that but as you can probably imagine, anyone still playing this game is ridiculous and will one-shot-kill you from 500 miles away just for sticking your shoulder out into the battlefield.

Now might be a good time to talk about the premise of Shadowrun. There are two factions, RNA and Lineage who are both fighting over some ancient relics. One faction has good intentions, the other has evil intentions. I can’t remember which way round it is but what it basically boils down to is a (up to) eight-versus-eight game of capture the flag. However, when playing online with the above mentioned dickheads, the idea of capture the flag goes out of the window and it’s basically a death match.

I wondered what was going on at one point when I actually scored with the relic only to be threatened with booting from the game! That’s a novel concept, I thought. Being kicked for playing by the rules. I looked it up online and apparently there is a thing going round saying how scoring with the relic doesn’t involve any skill and anyone that does it is a twat. I did read a rather good blog post saying how everyone that thinks this is basically a knob because if you can’t shoot someone carrying a glowing stick and they are unable to shoot you, then they are fucking shit and should probably find a different game to play.

Anyway, I play for achievements so how I go about doing that is the important bit, so here’s the lowdown on the majority of the achievements for Shadowrun and how you can get them with a minimum of nine friends.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So we will kick off with the easy ones. There are six for completing the offline training which teaches you the basics of the controls and abilities you can use in Shadowrun. The rest of them require playing online in ranked matches and there are three major categories for the achievement types.

The first category is playing achievements. There are 4 of these for playing 100 games with each race and another for winning 100 games. This is no easy feat when you consider that each match is a first to six wins, one game can take up to half an hour not including loading screens. The boosting set up for this involves the person who is the dedicated server quitting out of the match. When this happens, it counts as a completed match and when you are on RNA, in certain game types, this also counts as a win. With 400 games to play, splitting the wins to get 100 is easily done and this is by far the quickest way of racking up these 5 badboys.

The second category is killing achievements. There are 17 of these to get, some for getting 100 kills for each weapon, (expect for the SMG for some bizarre reason) killing 100 of each race, (except humans for some bizarre reason) 2 for getting kills with Gust and Strangle magic abilities, another for getting 100 kills with Smartlink active and another one for inflicting 100 mortal wounds with the katana which basically means making someone bleed out by hitting them from behind. Fucking ridiculous to put into play legitimately but it’s the first of many that’s in this category.

The last category is the miscellaneous one and there are a few in here that are a worth a mention. The most obvious one is Godlike which you get for killing an entire team of six by yourself without taking any damage. How you are supposed to do this legitimately is beyond me. First you have to get all the kills without getting shot but you also get screwed over if anyone else on your team kills someone. Basically you have to be playing against six rabbits while being on the same team as a minimum of three cats to ensure that you get it. Not going to happen without boosting.

Another involves you having to die, get resurrected, have your resurrector get killed and then score with the artefact. Again, this is a very unlikely scenario to find yourself in playing in a live game and especially when you will be booted for scoring with the artefact.

Another feature of the game is that it lets you play with Windows Vista players as well and there are four achievements for playing with them. The problem is for three of them, it required certain members of our group to have PC copies of the game. It also took a long time to get up to 100 cross platform kills as we only really had one player per game round to score a kill on.

And last but not least is the Heavy Smoker achievement that had many people pulling their hair out over. The achievement description states that you have to ignore a lot of damage using smoke, but apparently it just means you have to use smoke for an hour. There is no tracking to know how much smoking you have done so it’s a shot in the dark as to where you are with it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I’m pleased I managed to get there with this one but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of several over gamers out there. The most enjoyable part of boosting games is actually being able to have decent conversations and not deal with the dickheads mentioned above – so thanks to all for making this completion more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.